Google Hummingbird Update and Author Rank Authority

The recent Google Hummingbird update has been termed as the largest algorithmic update in the last 12 years. It has added several low levels to larger level buzzers in the existing algorithms making the search results much more sophisticated and compact. The new update has introduced Google Now Cards, and has even added support for long tailed keywords. Apart from these visible changes, there are several other changes which point to a direction where Google might be heading to. It’s been more than 6 months since we heard any news from Google Page Rank topic, and the algorithm is feared to be murdered by the search engine giant. With PR out of the way, crave for in-depth articles; are there any hidden messages which we are not able to catch?

A Look at the Recent Changes

We all have tried the new long tailed keyword methodology but there’s something else which you may or may not have ignored. Let’s try an example. This is the screenshot of results page which I received when I searched for “Barack Obama”.

Just have a glimpse on the right side of the results. This is something which you might not have paid adequate attention to. When Google knows that you are looking for a specific personality, it collects all information on that celebrity including birth date, short description, parent, education, children, upcoming events, recent events, etc. All this data is collected from several different portals and presented on the home page itself for the ease of the users.

With the above example, I want to show you that Google today understands the query entered by any visitor, and the algorithms used are capable of generating the optimal results matching that query. If Google were not catching your feeling, it would never have been able to generate something like this information pane.

Author Rank: What, How, When?

When we talk about Page Rank, we normally refer to trust factor of a particular website page as specified by Google. The concept of PR was killed due to several reasons. The major one among them was the change of blogger’s perspective towards PR. The number grew out to be a business expansion method and the sole purpose of bloggers diverted from writing high quality articles to gaining high page ranks. This led to a buggy system where users often suffered from lack of accurate results on search engines. Though Google has still not given any official update on PR updates, there’s not much hope that there is going to be any PR refresh in the coming future.

The question which arises now is that if PR is out of the way, how would Google update itself with the content quality? Well the answer might be Author Rank. The newly designed Google bots have been crafted in a manner to closely monitor every article written by a specific author, analyze the subjects where he poses a great deal of knowledge, and then rank him under a new system, Author Rank. This new grading system would be similar to native Page Rank in many aspects, and different too. On one hand, Google Page Rank used to provide a grade to website irrespective of the number of owners of the site, and on the other hand, the new also would give a unique grade to an author and this would be applicable for all the articles which he has written for his own as well as other portals.

The new Author Rank would help Google to present the best author works for every searched query. We have already seen that today’s Google understands every query fed to it by any user, and it thus is capable to provide the most accurate results to the visitors after interpreting the query, analyzing the subject of the query, identifying the subject specialist, and then providing the works of that author on the specified topic. This whole process is much more complicated than the traditional method where a search engine simply analyses a web page to check the keywords and then produces the results with similar type of keywords. This shows that Google seems to be developing emotions for the visitors.

The term Author Rank has already been mentioned by Google which means that we might soon experience an era of Author rank updates. Even Wikipedia has given a short description about the same term added recently to its database. The content on the Wiki is small, but it is soon going to come out in detailed fashion as soon as Google unveils other contents which it is hiding behind the curtains. Once Google analyzes the specialty of each author who writes for virtual worlds, and allots a performance number based on the same, the complete search engine optimization techniques would receive a strong blow.

What Happens Next?

Google might release a notification on author rank either this month, or next month, and when it releases the circular for the masses, the SEO field is bound to turn upside down. This certainly points towards completely changed SEO strategies as the ones which are being used today are still a bit page rank favorable ones. Another business which it would affect adversely is guest posting. The time’s not far when you might see even a good number of newbie writers getting their sites ranked higher owing to the quality and knowledge contained in their subjects.

If you want to prepare for the apocalypse, then there’s just one key I have for you. Write for viewers, and you would never be at loss. Once you understand your visitor’s needs, have enough knowledge on the topic you are going to cover, and implement every data to satisfy the hunger of visitors, you will always land down on right path irrespective of the number of changes Google makes. SEO was never about impressing search engines, but it is a by-product you gain when you impress your clients. If you have any other information which you would like to share with us, or any doubts crawl in your mind, feel free to put them down in the comments section. Till then, happy writing, and happy optimizing!

@Anil I think its Nirmala, and not Nirmal 🙂
BTW, thanks for this detailed description regarding Author Rank. In the screenshot of “Barack Obama” search in the example above, I didn’t knew that the data displayed on the right is collected from different sources. Really clever algorithmic implementation by Google.

Google Hummingbird update has nothing to do with the “Knowledge Graph” update initiated by Google at the start of this year. Both the updates are totally different. Hummingbird targets long tail keywords whereas Knowledge Graph is about popular search terms focused on top people, movies, books etc.

Sir, this article gave me the feels! Really awesome. You have covered in depth about Author rank. But I don’t think that PR is dead. We can expect an update in January 2014 as was visible from a tweet by Matt cutts!

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